Richard Linklater's 'Slacker': A Second Viewing

Who I was and who I wanted to be.

I watched Slacker tonight – tonight being when I wrote this, not when you’re reading this – a movie I haven’t watched in thirty-five years. I was in high school in 1991, and flipping through the channels late at night while my parents slept, and I stopped on PBS, channel 13. On was something the likes of which I’d never seen before – a movie with no narrative structure, where none of the characters or scenes came back, filled with non-professional actors monologuing at each other about life, about philosophy, about conspiracy theories, and sometimes about nothing at all.

I was living in Central Queens, and by that point I’d been reading Spy magazine and, through following writers I liked like Joe Queenan, Movieline and other more pedestrian showbiz rags. But there was no Internet and no social media, and so while I vaguely knew about the Sundance film festival (thanks to it being founded by Robert Redford), my only periscope into the world of indie filmmaking at that point was through the few movie pages of The Village Voice. And their mandate seemed to be to mostly focus on New York-based and especially queer¹ independent cinema.

I know, I had access to the Quad cinemas and the Anthology Film Archives and the Angelika and the Film Forum and so on, but keep in mind I was young, and going into The City at night to the East Village, still a truly dodgy place in the early 1990s, was not something I was going to do alone. And the friends I had back then weren’t going to ride downtown with me on a Wednesday night to hang out at some indie theater for the new Jarmusch movie.

So Slacker was my first exposure to something completely different and daring in cinema, and part of that was that – unlike other movies we would see coming out of Hollywood, even other movies of the indie revolution that followed – this seemed like something that anyone could have made.

In fact, at that point, as I’ve written in this space before, I had started at the age of 12 just jumping on the subway in the morning instead of going to school and just taking it to different parts of the city or even once into Newark, in the hopes of finding – something. I didn’t know what, but I knew it was going to be more interesting than I could find in central Queens where I lived.

Slacker was filled with the kind of young people I’d only met at that point as camp counselors – collegiate, or post-collegiate – educated, interested in ideas, open, friendly. This was a community I wanted to belong to.

And the thing I found really attractive about this movie was, you could tell everyone had fun making it. At that point, I’d been mostly inspired to want to be a more elegantly funny Woody Allen type comedian/writer/filmmaker, but Slacker showed me that there was more to aspire to out there.

And so, I began writing my adventures out in a primitive type play form, writing out the funny scenes and people I would see in my daily adventures. There are some things I still only remember to this day because I still have some of these scenes in a notebook that is currently in my possession. I had a vague idea that I could somehow direct and star in this movie, an idea that I gave up on when, at the age of 19, I dove headfirst into being a standup comedian.

The friends I had back then (in high school) weren’t going to ride downtown with me on a Wednesday night to hang out at some indie theater for the new Jarmusch movie.

By the mid-90s I’d begun to find my tribe of creative, talkative, slacker weirdos in the open mics and black box theaters of Manhattan’s gritty and historic Lower East Side. Where, at the age of 15, I would peruse the events listings, club nights, and performance opportunities in the back pages of the Voice, now I was, at 19, meeting people, attending performances, and living the kind of bohemian intellectually-seeking slacker life I’d seen in this movie which, at this point I should say, I had only seen once late at night on PBS channel 13.

Watching this movie reminded me, too, that life had once been radically different for young people. And I can say I know this not as an old fuddy-duddy shaking his cane at passing traffic. I say this as an adult who just got his bachelor degree surrounded by young people. It’s a different world. In some ways a worse world; paranoid after 9/11, yes, but also filled with a social media that drives the populace to think in extremes.

Believe it or not, there was a time when the announcement that the NYPD planned on installing cameras in Washington Square Park was met with a genuine public outrage and a debate over how far we would allow a surveillance state to go in the name of public safety and eliminating the sale of dirt weed and fake shrooms in New York. Now we are a happily self-surveilling society, with Ring cameras on every other door invading a privacy we gladly sacrifice in the name of the phone cameras in our pocket that can video ourselves or strangers and upload instantly for the entertainment of ourselves and other strangers.

I happen to like a lot of the Internet and social media. I like keeping up with the lives of friends I’ve known over the decades. I quite enjoy the livestream revolution that YouTube has brought about, and find that amateur-hosted podcasts are some of my favorite listening.

The fact that I can write this essay and send it directly into a hundred inboxes delights me. The fact that I can work on a book and publish it easily and cheaply is freeing, genuinely freeing.

But what Slacker reminded me was that we’ve lost a world of casual thought and action. Of sitting around being weird with televisions or reading a book, or meeting up with a group of friends and going to a rock show in an empty club or not going to a rock show. Of wandering from one party to the next and randomly running into friends you hadn’t seen in years.

There was no staring at phones or doomscrolling. And as much as I like to give myself a hard time over the mistakes I made as a young man, I had the freedom to make those mistakes and become a better person without an ever-present network of cameras and instantly-published gossip and slanderous distortions of the truth. There has been a tightening of the social noose that is now beginning to emotionally choke young people.

The Austin of Slacker is gone, of course. If the movie were made today, it would follow an endless parade of the bad comedians who have colonized the city, all complaining about how they no longer have the freedom to use slurs the way they used to.

But the New York City of bohemian slackers has shrunk now, too, replaced by hustlers grinding away at a million side gigs to stay afloat financially. Or the children of the well-to-do producing a conveyor belt of mediocre “content”. Everything now escalates too quickly, too angrily.

And I know, I sound like exactly the ranting old crank my friends and I made fun of when we were young. In my defense, I do say these things mostly with an understanding that the world changes constantly, that to complain that everything was better when you were younger is futile if your goal is to engage with the world around you today, and to work into the future.

I watched Slacker tonight for the second time of my life. I was reminded of who I was when I was younger, and who I had always wanted to be going forward.

Shout! Studios currently has Criterion’s transfer of the film up on their YouTube channel:

1. It feels weird using this word, but it was what the writers at the Voice used to describe the work of their own community in the 1990s and so if it’s now no longer acceptable I apologize right now.